whitespace and 'for'

[DorianEzra]

i'm trying to write a script that searches a given directory for music and plays it through another application serially.

in the playlist making section of the code, i run into problems. It seems the 'for' operator separates words from a name with whitespace as different items. I am not entirely sure if the problem is with 'for', but i believe that i might be able to circumvent this problem by having less piped through a program that finds whitespace in a name and inserts a '\' in front of it.

function make_playlist
{
	touch $PLAYLIST
	for i in $( ls $DIR ); do
        check_dir
	echo "$DIR$i" >> $PLAYLIST
	done
}	# end of make_playlist

check_dir is another function that changes $DIR appropriately if there are subfolders.

does anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

[dxqcanada]

Yes, for assumes that the list is delimited by whitespace.

You will have to change the IFS (Internal Field Separator).

Read This

[eggi]

Even though it's old-style and some versions of bash have bug related to scope, you can always try this (although the above reply is better form):

change

for i in $( ls $DIR ); do

to

$( ls $DIR )|while read i; do

while will read the entire line as one variable unless you supply it with multiples.

Best wishes,

Mike

[i92guboj]

function make_playlist
{
	touch $PLAYLIST
	for i in $( ls $DIR ); do
        check_dir
	echo "$DIR$i" >> $PLAYLIST
	done
}	# end of make_playlist

check_dir is another function that changes $DIR appropriately if there are subfolders.

does anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

First: never ever use ls as an input source, overall if ls is coloured. ANSI scape sequences for colors just add problems. Even more, in this case, it's just superfluous. What you are doing with this line:

	for i in $( ls $DIR ); do

Could be done with just:

	for i in $DIR/*; do

To be on the safe side, I'd also change this line:

	echo "$DIR$i" >> $PLAYLIST

By this one:

	echo "${DIR}/${i}" >> $PLAYLIST